It’s not unusual for comedians to have sticking points when it comes to perceived boundaries on their expression, but their commitment to preserving the R-word specifically speaks to either a persistent belief in its harmlessness, comic potential, or both.
Illustration: Zohar Lazar
In his new HBO special, Panicked, Marc Maron vents about his peers in the comedy industry who voted for Donald Trump out of a supposed desire to protect their free speech. “All they really wanted was to be able to say the R-word with impunity,” he says. Maron then lists a series of horrifying consequences that have resulted from Trump’s reelection, including “the collapse of the federal government, the destabilization of the global economy, tens of thousands of people being deported to places they might not have even come from, the actual suppression of speech and rights of LGBTQ people and women, and the rise of authoritarianism.” Finally, he tags the joke: “Sometimes I feel like asking them, ‘Was it worth it, you fucking retard?’”
Although Maron doesn’t name the specific comedians he’s referencing in this bit, he has since clarified that he wrote it about a particular strain of comedian-podcaster — the Joe Rogans, Theo Vons, and Tony Hinchcliffes of the world — who skew libertarian and use the word without reservation. In April, Rogan inspired discourse when he said on The Joe Rogan Experience that “the word retarded is back” and celebrated its return as “one of the great culture victories” won by podcasts such as his own. Bert Kreischer and Tom Segura shared similar thoughts on their podcast, 2 Bears, 1 Cave, in June. “Everyone says retarded again. It’s in shows; it’s in stand-up,” Segura said. “The people kind of were like, ‘No, we want it back. We’re going to say it again.’” In the 2024 pilot episode of the FX sitcom English Teacher, a pair of dismayed high-school teachers bond over their shared observation that the kids are “saying the R-word again” and no longer “into being woke.” Meanwhile, the new Naked Gun movie features a villain named Richard Cane, who owns a private club where one of the perks of membership is freedom to say the word retarded without backlash.
The public temperature has shifted noticeably since 2018, when Segura’s defense of the R-word in his Netflix special, Disgraceful, sparked impassioned demands for the special’s removal. (The saga took a surreal turn when Netflix fired a white executive for misguidedly using the N-word while questioning why the platform had deemed the R-word more acceptable.) In 2024, Nikki Glaser told a joke featuring the word during her set on The Roast of Tom Brady — while sharing the stage with Segura, no less. “You put the ‘downs’ in ‘touchdowns.’ You really do. You put the ‘special’ in ‘special teams.’ You put the ’tard’ in ‘Rob Gronkowski is retarded,’” she said. Not only did she and Netflix not face meaningful backlash, the success of that set directly led to her getting the opportunity to host the Golden Globes.
The cultural mood swing signals a larger trend Maron touches on briefly in his special. In a bit anticipating the audience’s reaction to him saying the word retard, he predicts that he’ll receive emails from fans reminding him that its use, even in a satirical context, is hurtful. “Progressives have really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem,” he says. “I know these are important issues, but you do realize we annoy the average American into fascism.” His logic echoes comedians and comedy podcasters on the so-called “dirtbag left,” who, in the mid-2010s, launched massively successful shows like Chapo Trap House and the now-defunct Cum Town, where they frequently used off-color language while espousing broadly progressive beliefs. Their worldview that being on the right side of history doesn’t necessitate being humorless scolds turned out to be a contagious one that has since found its way into stand-up. “I’m going to be a good person locally, but I’m just going to be fun now,” Saturday Night Live cast member Emil Wakim said in a 2024 set about how none of the gestures he’d taken in the name of progressive values had made a meaningful difference in the world. “I marched. I recycled. Dude, I voted for Joe Biden! I’m saying retarded now.”
Baked into this joke is a prevalent argument about why it’s okay to vocalize and laugh at this word that many consider unacceptable. It doesn’t treat the R-word as the disparaging term that people with intellectual disabilities view as hurtful, but rather a symbol of performative social justice. In her 2023 HBO special, Salute Me or Shoot Me, Sam Jay makes a case for the word’s utility and revival that tries to account for this. “There are words in society we no longer have access to because we’re so afraid of offending anybody, and we’re so ready to police people rather than listen to people that we don’t even have a conversation any fucking more,” she says. “The problem to me was never with the word retarded. It was just that we were calling the wrong people retarded. And that’s on us. People with autism are not retarded. They have autism. We understand that. Their brain just works differently. It processes experiences differently. Fine. People with Down syndrome aren’t retarded … Any type of learning delay or learning disorder: You’re not retarded. You just learn differently, as we all do, in actuality. But Herschel Walker is retarded!”
The joke, delivered in Jay’s ruminative style, plays well. She takes the appropriate time to disarm the audience’s sensitivities and clarify the target of the joke. But execution aside, it’s hardly fresh comic territory. Stand-ups have been mounting defenses of the R-word since the first rumblings of it becoming politically incorrect in the early 2000s. Consider Ralphie May’s joke from his 2006 album, Girth of a Nation. Or Nick Swardson’s joke from his 2007 album, Party. Or a joke a younger Maron reportedly told during the taping of his 2007 Comedy Central Presents special. Or, more recently, the joke Matt Rife reportedly told on tour in 2024; Russell Peters’s joke from his 2025 YouTube special, Act Your Age; or Ari Shaffir’s joke from his 2025 Netflix special, America’s Sweetheart. There are, of course, nuances that differentiate these jokes from one another, but there’s enough overlap across them to suggest an overtaxing of the premise.
It’s not unusual for comedians to have sticking points when it comes to perceived boundaries on their expression, but their commitment to preserving the R-word specifically speaks to either a persistent belief in its harmlessness, comic potential, or both. Sometimes, this stems from their opinion that the supposedly tactful replacements for the R-word are equally if not more offensive — a classic example of the euphemism treadmill in practice. (May on the term mentally challenged: “That’s way more offensive than retard. That’s a name most retarded people can’t even pronounce!”) They may likewise argue that the words moron, imbecile, and dumb were once also used to refer to people with intellectual disabilities yet remain in the vernacular and joke about that moral inconsistency, not unlike when comedians joke about the newer term unhoused. (A crossover example courtesy of SNL writer KC Shornima: “I got in trouble the other day for using the word homeless … I don’t think their problem is marketing. It’s not like I called him a house retard.”)
But it could just be that the term carries undeniable “juice,” as Maron has noted. It’s a nostalgic throwback for generations who remember a time when it was ubiquitous, conveys a hint of danger to generations who have only known it as a slur, and slots satisfyingly into punch lines because of its jagged consonants. Louis C.K. synthesizes several of these arguments into a long bit about the R-word in his 2020 “comeback” special, Sincerely Louis C.K., where he makes the case that the word’s eradication hasn’t meaningfully improved anyone’s quality of life. The bit is nuanced, but he demonstrates how the word gets knee-jerk laughs by repeating it over and over, then repeating it again in a Boston accent, and then deliberately elongating its syllables.
At their worst, R-word jokes rely too heavily on these reflexive pops and repetition. They incentivize underdeveloped writing where comedians aren’t doing much other than flouting the stigma and flashing a shit-eating grin. Take Michael Che’s joke about how to ward off bears from his 2021 Netflix special, Shame the Devil: “You have to make yourself really big, and you’ve got to make a lot of noise. Because a bear won’t eat you if they think you’re retarded,” he says. “That’s not a nice word to say, I know. But I only said it because I thought it would make you laugh. And it did.” A more recent example is featured in Jerrod Carmichael’s 2025 HBO special, Don’t Be Gay. After explaining that he doesn’t regard white people as having a higher status than him because his only exposure to them growing up was one family where every member “suffered from some form of mental disability,” he gets a laugh purely from restating this more bluntly: “I told my therapist, ‘I don’t think I have an inferiority complex, because for the first 13 years of my life, I thought all white people were retarded.’”
Carmichael is bold enough not to cloak his use of the R-word in a preemptive defense or apology, but his lack of a stronger punch line exposes his reliance on the word as a crutch. When asked in an interview what he’d say to people offended by the joke, Carmichael said it’s “never been a thing that someone said to me after a show.” Anecdotal or otherwise, evidence like this suggests that there’s some validity to the claims by Rogan and Segura that casual use of the R-word has grown acceptable again. But as the taboo surrounding it diminishes, so too does the comedic value of saying it onstage in order to shock an audience, defend its usage, or use it as I’m-one-of-the-cool-ones shorthand.
In 2024, Australian comic James Donald Forbes McCann, who tours with Shane Gillis — an avid R-word reclaimist in his own right — recited a comedic poem he’d written signaling that this shift is already complete. “A year ago, I said the word retarded in a crowded room, and I was deafened by the sound of thanks and celebration,” he reads from a book. “I was the John the Baptist of saying the word retarded.” He continues: “Last night, I said the word retarded in much the same sort of way. There was still celebration, but it wasn’t the same at all. The world has changed.” McCann grows defiant as he explains that the “battle” over the R-word has been “fought and won,” and that he’s on the lookout for a new unmentionable word to reclaim: “Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. But I’m not in a weeping mood. Retarded has been vanquished, but the wind is crying faggy.”
